Thursday, January 27, 2011

APPLES ARE GREEN

I awoke with a start to hear the avalanche of snow plummeting from the slate roof of our neighbor's house. Ahhhhh -- the storm had, in fact, arrived. I could go back to sleep . . . After all, I had already prepared my post for today. . . and here it is.

Every day, I climb to the third floor of our old Victorian house and I see it hanging above the garret window . . . . the small framed picture drawn with red, green and brown crayon by my then three year old daughter Lorig -- an apple tree, brown for the trunk, green for the apples -- or rather, green for some of the apples; the rest of the apples on Lorig's tree are hastily drawn small red circles. The picture is a constant reminder in winter that spring is on its way, but there is something more, or I wouldn't have hung the picture above the window at the top of the stairs and kept it there for 32 years.

Lorig was in nursery school when she drew that picture. She had grown up with apple trees all around her, in our back yard, in the back yard of her Grandma Jennie and Grandpa Peter Bilezikian and in Wilbraham, the mountain retreat of her Medzmama Azniv and her Medzpapa Nishan Charkoudian. Lorig knew that our apples were green, often when they were ripe and always when they were not. She drew what she knew.

But her nursery school teacher, as sweet as she was, corrected Lorig. կարմիր են խնձոր, (Garmir en khntsor -- apples are red) chided the teacher as she went ahead and put as many red apples on the tree as would fit. Lorig came home, clearly concerned, and showed me the picture -- Mama, look! The teacher said that my apples had to be red!

10 comments:

  1. To take it to the next level, any color apples would have been just fine, after all, we were taught by our mother never to color inside the lines, and always to think beyond what society taught us.

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  2. Outside the lines is right, as her father taught her. (in fact we pretty much got yelled at for any excessive [actual or metaphorical] coloring inside the lines) And aren't we all lucky because we are having such a great time following that advice!

    PS: I wish I could do the Armenian letters, but I think she meant to say "Garmir en khntsorneruh".

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  3. When my daughter came home from nursery school (Somerville Public Schools)with a drawing that the teacher had criticized because she hadn't stayed inside the lines, her "other mother" immediately applied a political analysis: the "capitalist system" was beginning early in the schools to train obedient, unquestioning workers

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    1. I always taught my children to draw outside the lines!

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  4. Here is the link for translating English to Armenian (or vice versa) and you can simply copy and paste the Armenian letters: http://www.lexilogos.com/english/armenian_dictionary.htm

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  5. Each child's drawing is unique to that child; no adult (teacher or other) has the right to change it. Discuss the drawing and raise questions about the drawing and learn the child's intent.

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  6. First you have to eat the apple, taste the apple, and then if you want to express an apple in visual form, you have to start with colors because color forms the shape -- and the choice of colors comes from what you have tasted.

    In answer to SS above, all political, religious and social systems require conformism.

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  7. Thanks, Mama. I think I drew the red apples. But she made me draw them.

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  8. i was really intrigued by SS' 'capitalist system' comment. The war that raged in the thirties and first half of the fourties, the Second World War, pitted different forms of 'capitalism' against each other. there was the state run capitalism of Stalin, Adolf, and the Japanese military clique, pitted against a growing state run, collapsing private entrepreneurial capitalism of the American variant. Under Roosevelt's reign, the state had intruded massively on the free market, aka free market capitalism,but it had not yet gripped the throat and breathing apparatus of the average citizen. Time and again, the war turned on the ability of the american soldier to think on his own, to be independent of the authoritarian influence of government or the suffocating strictures of the military. Decapitated of their officers, the american unit could fight successfully, though stripped of their officer corps, not so, the Japanese, or the Germans, or the Soviets, and that quality of the american soldier proved decisive in many a battle and in the overall strategic assembly of the two forces pitted against the United States. that independence sprung from the culture in which the soldier was raised, which included public education. However, since the Second World War, our education system has been transformed. it has been wrested from the local control of communities and parent/teachers associations, and placed increasingly under the control of the Federal government's Department of Education and the teacher's unions, neither of which could ever be described as philosophically capitalist. i do share with you the frustration of what transpires in the public school arena. however, to point out a most recent example, a new hampshire judge, purportedly, ordered a family to cease and desist from home schooling their child, and the reason given by the judge was the home schooling was too religious. here is a judge that no doubt would have seconded the teacher's insistence that all apples be colored red.

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  9. Uncle Paul, always with the help of some of the children, planted our fruit trees. it was an event that assumed liturgical elegance. we would dig the hole, just so deep; we would place the sapling, whose root system was still in its burlap bag,in the center of the hole we had just dug and nudge the dirt back into the hole that surrounded the planted tree, making sure the tree was standing straight up, because we did not want a 'leaning tower of Pisa' variant in our garden. we would then make an indentation around the perimeter of the planted tree and fill it with water. this ensured there would be no run-off, and the tree would be the sole beneficiary of the water from our hose. that planting began the excitement of watching a tree grow throughout the season, and seasons to follow, and the heightened expectation that grew with knowledge that it would be several seasons before the tree bore fruit. when that dwarf apple tree we planted smack in front of our dining room windows blossomed, i would make a beeline, not too hard to do, given our hives in the yard, to the child size tree and inspect the blossoms for the first signs of 'bulging'. when that occurred, and the green apple appeared, it was just a matter of time, oh, couldn' wait, until i saw my first YELLOW apple. Even more excitement was to follow, because when those yellow apples ripened, the trees' roots struck the mother lode. the apples became balls of gold hanging by a thread, only if we had the patience to wait, and the fortitude to stand guard against teachers with buckets of red paint!

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